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  • Gigaplex - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    Once again Intel gimps the introduction of new instructions such that developers can't really depend on them to be present.
  • StrangerGuy - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    Well, its not like they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again...Right? *cough*
  • Samus - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    Exactly why the hell isn't SGX in every CPU. Do they really expect developers to even bother if it has niche market penetration. Did they not even pay attention to 3D Now?
  • Mikemk - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    What's 3d now?
  • PrinceGaz - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    AMD's version of SSE. Because only AMD CPUs supported those instructions and there were far more Intel CPUs about, hardly any software took advantage of 3D Now!
  • bug77 - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    I rest his case ;-)
  • beginner99 - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    Yeah this has been terrible in the last couple years. First the TXT fiasco, not working properly and disabled by default anyway on K-version CPUs. Now another failure. AVX basically still limited to HPC. Only mass product using it is x264 and AFAIK the benefit is pretty limited. Nothing new. Will take a decade as it always has till new extension become widely used and beneficial.
  • Gigaplex - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    VT-x was a bigger issue, it hampered the roll-out of XP Mode for Windows 7.
  • hansmuff - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    And let us not forget TSX, promised and then pulled, because of bugs in it.
  • SydneyBlue120d - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    Why no i3 CPU?!?!
  • yannigr2 - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    If this was an AMD problem, how many articles out there would be attacking AMD? I am not talking about reposting about it like it is a simple weather report, but attacking directly AMD.
  • r3loaded - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    So is SGX essentially equivalent to ARM TrustZone? Do we have any software examples that use or are able to use this technology?
  • mctylr - Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - link

    Yes, SGX is similar to ARM's TrustZone (in the general sense), it provides an additional level of hardware (enforced) privilege separation, somewhat akin to hierarchical protection domains (protection rings). The difference from x86 "protected mode" (supervisor mode) is that it extends to protect memory - code and data, as well as execution from what I understand.

    I believe the commonly cited examples of applications to utilize SGX are anti-malware / anti-virus software, digital rights management (DRM), and cryptographic components or subsystems.
  • asmian - Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - link

    You listed the stuff that's good. Don't forget that malware, viruses, rootkits and the NSA will be all over this and rubbing their hands at the ability to hide themselves from debuggers and white-hat detection. The real surveillance nightmare begins here.
  • JoeMonco - Thursday, October 8, 2015 - link

    It's not going to be very useful to malware or the NSA when this will only be a feature in a small minority of CPUs. It's not as if you can force a target to install the exact Skylake chip you need.
  • OsCeZrCd - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link

    I am a bit afraid of this feature. Looks like a virus could use it to circumvent my Kaspersky.
  • asmian - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link

    Exactly. And viruses avoiding AV scanners is the least of it. This would prevent AV companies from being able to disassemble or debug new malware of all forms as there will be no access possible to their memory space. The benefits for some niche applications are surely not outweighed by having apps of any kind that cannot be trusted by users as they can never be independently verified as to what exactly they are doing.

    There is an extremely prescient commentary on all this linked to the Qubes OS project from Joanna Rutkowska - this is NOT tinfoil-hattery by any means: http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.fr/2013/09/thou...
  • Andy Kay - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    You guys are getting me worried. I'm no techie, but I recently purchased a notebook with a Skylake chipset, described as "manufacturer refurbished". I soon had cause to re-install Windows, and it told me that Intel SGX would be removed and would have to be re-installed when Windows was back up. I had no idea what SGX was, hence finding my way here. Is it possible that my notebook has some code on it that may be used maliciously, that may have already done its dirty-work, and that would have survived the Windows re-installation?
  • 29a - Tuesday, June 12, 2018 - link

    No.

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